Charity Nebbe

Talk of Iowa Host

Charity Nebbe grew up in rural Iowa just outside of Cedar Falls. She began her career in public radio at WOI Radio in Ames, Iowa when she was a student at Iowa State University and has been working in public radio ever since. Early in her career she created Chinwag Theater a nationally syndicated public radio show that she produced and co-hosted with well known author Daniel Pinkwater. She spent ten years at Michigan Radio in Ann Arbor and in 2010 returned to Iowa.

Charity is now the host of Iowa Public Radio’s Talk of Iowa, heard weekday mornings at 10. She is also the host of Iowa Ingredient, soon to debut on Iowa Public Television and the author of the children's book “Our Walk in the Woods,” published in 2008.

Ways to Connect

A pipe springs a leak. A window won’t close. You’ve got water in your basement. What do you do?

When it comes to home improvement, our expert Bill McAnally thinks that people have gotten a false sense of security from watching TV and YouTube.

The problem, McAnally says, is that people don’t realize that those shows’ creators “took actually twelve hours to do that half hour show to make everything look good, and they didn’t show all of the things that did go wrong.”

When you plant an apple tree, it's sometimes a long wait for that tree to mature. But when it does you can suddenly find yourself with a lot of apples, which is great for pie making and canning.

During this hour of Talk of Iowa, host Charity Nebbe talks with Diana Cochran, Iowa State University Extension fruit crop expert about the best ways to harvest and store apples. Richard Jauron, ISU Extension Horticulture expert also joins the conversation to answer listener questions.

Four hundred years after his death in 1616, the plays of William Shakespeare are still performed around the world. With 410 feature-length films and numerous TV retellings of his work, Shakespeare is recognized as the most filmed author of all time and has writing credits on 1100 films.

None of this would have been possible without one book: the First Folio, which is a collection of Shakespeare's plays that was published in 1623.

From the time it opened in 1972, Hancher Auditorium on the University of Iowa campus was one of the premier performance spaces in Iowa. That all changed with the historic flooding of Eastern Iowa in 2008 when the auditorium was flooded beyond repair.

In the early 1900s, one of the most populous birds in the world, passenger pigeons, were hunted to extinction in the wild. The very last passenger pigeon, Martha, died in captivity in 1914. A few years later, the United States enacted the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, a treaty that has paved the way for conservation efforts that have saved countless endangered bird species.

Your friendly neighborhood herbivores, like deer and rabbits, aren’t opposed to snacking on your garden in the best of times, but they are particularly prone to snacking on ornamental trees and shrubs when the snow flies.

Iowa State University Extension Horticulturist Richard Jauron says the plants that are most vulnerable to deer during the winter months are evergreens like arborvitae and yews, but new plantings of trees and shrubs should also be protected.

Sandra Steingraber is proud of her PhD in biology, her position as Scholar in Residence at Ithaca College and her two arrests. Not necessarily in that order.

While Steingraber, an author, biologist, and activist, has studied science in a lab for decades, she knew she had to do more to effect the change she wanted to see in the environment. So she got herself arrested. Twice.

"This is a great article, just don't read the comment section" is a warning and rebuke sent in emails and attached to links throughout the Internet. But when news organizations like NPR and the Quad City Times decide to shut their comment sections down, an outcry claiming the loss of the Internet's public square usually follows. Racheal Ruble, Lecturer in the Communication Studies Program at Iowa State University, says the need to comment online comes, oddly enough, from a sense of community.

We all want our children to do well in life, and most parents want to do what they can to help. How much is too much help?

Laura Hamilton, author of the new book "Parenting to a Degree: How Family Matters for College Women's Success," set out to answer this question. She followed a handful of women through their college years and into their 30s to find out how parental involvement helped or hurt them.

She sorts parents into four categories--including helicopter parents, bystanders, and paramedics--depending on how often parents stepped in to help their children.

As summer comes to a close, insects and arachnids have some work to get done, and that makes them easier to see. According to Iowa State University Extension Entomologist Donald Lewis, it's been a good year for spiders.

"I don't know that it's been a spectacular year, but it's been a good year," he says.

"Its in the fall of the year when we can see them. Its in the fall of the year when they make their biggest webs, and it's the time of year when dew settles on the webs and makes them most visible."

Dan Flores, author of ten books on western U.S. history, calls coyotes "an American original," having evolved in North America over five million years ago. Many people tried to kill them off as late as the 1960s, but they have bounced back and are now found in all states except Delaware and Hawaii.

Dogs have always had a knack for finding bones. Trained dogs can sniff out explosives, drugs, victims of disasters.

On this edition of Talk of Iowa, host Charity Nebbe talks with the owners of some canine archeologists who put their bone finding skills to good use. The founders of Samaritan Detection Dogs use trained dogs to help in some unusual ways with archaeological research, conservation work, and human remains cases.

Plants grow in the spring and summer, so you might think that would be the time to re-seed or over-seed your lawn. You would be wrong.

Iowa State University Extension Turf Grass Specialist Nick Christians says the date he circles on the calendar for planting grass seed is August 15th. He says that date gives the seed enough time to grow before a freeze, and cooler temperatures will give it a better chance of competing with other weeds.

Iowa’s first cricket farm that’s producing crickets for human consumption is up and running. Becky Herman is a co-founder of Iowa Cricket Farmer, and she says right now, she’s got nearly 200,000 cricket living in blue bins at the farm. She’s a school teacher and said the idea came to her in the classroom.

After more than 10 years, Sean Moeller is leaving Daytrotter. He says it seems like the right time, and he’s ready for a new project. During this Talk of Iowa interview, he talks with host Charity Nebbe about why he’s moving on, what he’s built, and how Daytrotter began.

From canvas tents to Class C motorhomes, how we camp is changing as technology improves and the outdoor industry adapts military technology for use by the average consumer.

Recreational camping became a hobby in the United States after the Civil War when wealthy business owners would hire guides to take them up into the Adirondack Mountains. That’s according to Martin Hogue, who teaches landscape architecture in the College of Environmental Science and Forestry at the State University of New York in Syracuse and is author of the forthcoming book Thirtyfour Campgrounds.

Murders were uncommon in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in the 1940s, and especially a murder at the very high-end Roosevelt Hotel, sometimes called the Ritz-Carlton of Eastern Iowa. On Dec. 15, 1948, a hotel chambermaid found aircraft engineer Byron Hattman dead in room 729.

In the early 19th century wild cougars, wolves, and bears once roamed the vast Iowa prairies, but today they're nowhere to be found. Where did they go, and where are they now?

During this hour of Talk of Iowa host Charity Nebbe talks with Emeritus Associate Professor of Natural Resource Ecology and Management at Iowa State University, Jim Pease, about the history of Iowa's native wildlife and some of its oldest predators.

Watching fireflies as they light up a soft warm night is one of the pure joys of summer. As fireflies dwindle and send their last signals of the season, we find out what all of that flashing is about.

In this Horticulture Day edition of Talk of Iowa, Chairty Nebbe talks with Iowa State University Extension entomologist Donald Lewis about the majesty and fertility of fireflies, the genesis of Hort Day, and the upcoming 30th anniversary celebration. Later, ISU Extension horticulturist Richard Jauron joins the conversation to answer listener questions.

There’s lots of farmland in Iowa, but only about 1 percent of that land changes ownership in any given year. So if you’re a beginning farmer looking to start out, you’ve got to network with people willing to rent you somewhere to farm or work with your family.

Farms have doubled in size in the last 100 years, and the consolidation of farmland makes it that much harder. That’s according to Chad Hart, an economist at Iowa State University.

A new type of yoga festival is coming to Cedar Rapids next month with the aim of empowering people to try new ways of moving their bodies. Ally Thompson is producer for Fields of Yogis, which in addition to hosting yoga workshops, will include classes on burlesque dancing, hula hooping, belly dancing and slacklining.

It's an easy punch line when someone makes a strange noise or makes a random body movement to joke about Tourette syndrome. But for some Iowans, it isn't funny.

Tourette syndrome is a neurological condition that affects body movement, and one out of every 360 children in the United States is diagnosed each year. During this hour of Talk of Iowa, host Charity Nebbe talks with Dr. Samuel Kuperman of the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics who treats patients with TS and two Iowans who live with the syndrome.

What is a master gardener? Someone who loves gardening, has a strong interest in helping others improve their gardens, and is willing to volunteer on projects. Iowa State Uniersity offers training classes every fall semester starting Sept. 1.

During this hour of of Talk of Iowa Charity Nebbe talks with Iowa State University Extension Master Gardener Coordinator Denny Shrock about what it means to become a master gardener and his work with ISU to help other gardeners get the best yields each year.

You probably can’t go out for sushi nearby, and it might take an hour to get to a discount store but for some the benefits of living in rural Iowa more than outweigh those inconveniences. At the same time more and more Iowans are drawn to city life. According to Dave Swenson, an economist at Iowa State University, the numbers prove that true.

“Just this decade, 71 of Iowa’s 99 counties have posted 2015 populations smaller than they were in 2010. That’s a trend that’s continued for at least two decades now,” he says.

Decks can be the perfect place to spend a nice summer night but they can also be tricky to maintain.

This hour on Talk of Iowa host Charity Nebbe talks with home improvement expert Bill McAnally about decks and answers listener questions about their decks. What is the best material to use for a deck? How do you maintain them, and when it is time to call in an expert?

When Claire Hoffman was five, she moved to Fairfield, Iowa with her mother and brother, so that her family could follow the teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. When Maharishi asked his followers to move to Fairfield, it created quite the rift between his followers and the townspeople.

"You know in researching this book, I went back and went through the archives of the Fairfield Ledger. And you see this sense of outcry that Fairfield had been invaded," explains Hoffman.